Kazumi Yumoto, translated by Cathy Hirano,
The Letters.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001

Like The Friends, Kazumi Yumoto's first novel, The Letters is about death, but it is also about somnambulism. Soon after six-year-old Chiaki's father died, her mother went through a phase of aimlessly riding Tokyo commuter trains. “It was not as if she was going anywhere. She just boarded whatever train happened to come along, then rode and rode until she decided to get off.”

Now the adult Chiaki finds herself in a similar stupor, having quit her nursing job and accumulated enough sleeping pills to knock her out each night, or, if she gives in to the urge, forever. But the death of Chiaki's childhood landlady, Mrs. Yanagi, who had her own theory about sleepwalking, rouses Chiaki to attend the funeral and recall a time when, as a young child, she wrote letters bound for “the next world.”

In keeping with her subject matter, Yumoto's contemplative prose evokes a bewitching stillness, thick with repressed emotion and shot through with flashes of humor. The bulk of the story takes place when Chiaki is in first grade and paralyzed by a host of unfamiliar fears. The world outside her apartment suddenly seems strewn with “open manholes,” like the darkness her father disappeared into when he died.

Gruff Mrs. Yanagi senses Chiaki's unease and lets her in on a startling secret. In Mrs. Yanagi's apartment sits a drawer slowly filling with letters that she has been paid to deliver, upon her death, to people's loved ones in the great beyond. Just because so many others believe in an afterlife doesn't mean Chiaki becomes convinced that, as the landlady insists, her father is somewhere watching over her. Still, it intrigues her into writing to him. A single letter turns into a stream of them as Chiaki tries, without really realizing it at the time, “to understand some secret I could not unravel on my own.”

One might compare the subtle shifts of mood in Yumoto's sophisticated finely crafted narrative to the poplar tree outside the young Chiaki's window. She spends many hours watching the light and shadows shift across its leaves, but it never loses its ability to surprise her. Years later, at Mrs. Yanagi's funeral, the tree inspires another new perspective: “The poplar never bothers to think that it has no place to go. It simply is where it is now. And I, too, I am here now.”

Though Chiaki hasn't solved all the mysteries of the universe, or even of her family, she is alive and, finally, awake - and that, she realizes, is enough.

Renée Victor
Fall 2002